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By Chris Montgomery

 

Power outages cost customers tens of billions of dollars each year in the United States alone. Consequently, regulators and customers scrutinize utilities for service interruptions and pressure them to continually improve reliability.

 

In theory, an Outage Management System (OMS) can cut truck rolls and restoration times by providing proactive notification of outages (often before a single customer calls); and by providing detailed information on the location, extent, and status of an outage. But state-of-the-art outage management requires a well-designed Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) platform.

 

This article explains the three challenges posed by "traditional" outage management. It then outlines the six things to look for in an AMI system to be confident it can overcome those issues.

 

Outage challenges

Utilities have processes and systems to identify outages, dispatch crews and communicate with affected customers. However, current approaches have at least three challenges.

 

1. Lack of reliable and timely outage reporting. Although utilities can use SCADA to monitor substations and large feeders, they rely heavily on customer calls to learn about smaller outages. This dependence leads to delays and inaccuracies. Customers often assume a neighbor reported the outage, or wait to see if the power comes back on, or may not be home to notice. Lack of timely and reliable information can cause utilities to inadequately staff repair crews or to dispatch crews to the wrong area. It can also make it difficult to accurately predict restoration times.

 

2. Slow restoration when outages are nested. Utilities often have difficulty detecting smaller outages nested inside larger ones – for example, when a downed tree cuts service to several houses within an area affected by a feeder outage. Since most customers do not call to report power restoration, utilities have no way to verify whether service has been restored to all customers. As a result, the crew assigned to fix the large outage often leaves the area before nested outages are detected. Once the utility discovers a nested outage, it must dispatch another crew to resolve the problem and restore service, which increases operational costs and results in longer outages.

 

3. Difficulty diagnosing single-customer outages. As many as 75% of reports are for single-service outages, according to smart grid consulting firm Enspiria Solutions. In many cases, the problem is on the customer side of the meter; for example, a tripped circuit breaker. Unless customer service staff can determine over the phone on which side of the meter the problem lies, the utility must dispatch a truck to the customer site to diagnose the problem.

 

AMI opportunities

An AMI system can address these pressing outage-management challenges by providing a far more complete and real-time picture of outages and restoration. Smart meters can send a notification (a “last gasp”) when they lose power; likewise, they can transmit restoration messages when power is back on. Along with other features in the network and back office software, these proactive notifications give utilities a powerful new tool for improving outage management. 

Next page: Requirements for robust AMI-based outage management >>

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Outage Management - key points

Very good article. Well written and to the point. I especially liked the point on integration - this needs to happen with SCADA/DMS systems as well. In particular, the 2-way interface has always been problematic to be able to move some key features like tags (to be able to differentiate planned outages from unplanned outages) back and forth.

Subramanian Vadari - 01/04/2012 - 07:52

Outages: Key Facts

Gud ones..Covered the article with practical examples.The Outages can happen any time and any place. AMI System cannot provide total solution to the problem mentioned and also itsa Reactive mechnaism.Like attending the Outage Calls is the Reactive Mechanism which almost AMI covers But knowing the outages prior to occurance is the smartness Where analytics comes in Picture.i am working these days with utiltiies on it . Integrating with the Systems can archive the Opertaional Excellency.Analytics add the Business flavour to achive with Smartness and also reduces time.

Vijay Kumar - 01/04/2012 - 10:13

Outage: The Hard Part is Integration Software

Chris provides a good overview. However, it's a mistake to interface AMI directly to an outage management system. There are several reasons. First, utilities have or will likely have more than one AMI system over time. Second, the outage data needs to be buffered and prioritized - think hospitals and police stations - before being dumped to the OMS. Third, many utilities are interested in sending alerts to customers as well; this requires integration with a notification system and CIS so CSRs know when and which customers have been alerted. Fourth, the integration platform needs to be able to automatically ping meters to check for restoration, in a managed and organized fashion. And there are more reasons. The takeaway: best practices outage management requires the AMI and OMS, but also a highly capable integration platform to complete the solution.

Chris King - 01/04/2012 - 11:29

Outage Management - Last Gasp

Nice article Chris M. I completely agree with Chris King's comment. Additionally, in my experience the "last gasp" is not always (rarely?) an indication of a true outage thus your analytics routines must be able to filter the false alarms.

Calvin Moree - 01/04/2012 - 11:45

Outage: Intergration and Last Gasp

Its extremely important to buffer and provide some aggregation capabilities for AMI outage messages before sending them to the OMS/DMS. If you lose a zone substation you could be flooded with 100K messages, so aggregation would enable you to related those messages to the network model and just push a single message to the OMS/DMS. You can also tell them to wait for say 2 mins to see if other AMI messages are received. Last Gasp is only about 10% reliable if you have meters without batteries Might also consider pinging of meters under certain outage conditions, or installing meters on distribution transformers

Peter Newland - 01/04/2012 - 15:04

AMI Platform

Which is the best algorithm in the meter for detecting outage. Does the meter have to have a voltage measuring capability which sends the 'outage' message or can it be a function of the kWh measurement already being done and transmitted. In other words will the capability for 'outage'detection reside in the MDM?

A.Raja Rao - 01/05/2012 - 03:52

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